On a rainy day at North Loop Dodge in Tarrant County, a car salesman walks in with two huge bags from Sports Town. “Wanna baseball?” he asks the two people in the repair waiting room who are watching the episode of “Family Affair” where Mr. French almost has to marry…
Their names move across the computer screens of major league baseball offices, veiled in secrecy and controversy. Identities will not be revealed for weeks, even as they now begin to sever ties with employers and make dramatic adjustments in family life to become potential replacement players for Major League Baseball…
SWEETWATER–The retiree from Alvin, Texas, turns off I-20 and maneuvers the gray Ford pickup down the gravel road toward the private hunting club. His door opens to reveal a shopping bag, a cowboy hat, and Styrofoam coffee cups with cold, wet grounds still in the bottom. There are guns and…
It was three NFC championship games ago. I was standing in the driveway of the Cowboys’ San Francisco hotel–one day before Dallas beat the 49ers. Charles Haley was standing nearby, waiting for cough medicine. None that tastes bad, he told his wife, in a fine rendition of the man-who-has-a-cold whine…
In case you haven’t noticed yet, it’s Valentine’s Day in the seasonal aisle at Kroger. That means it’s about the day big-league pitchers and catchers normally report to camp in Florida and Arizona. But, of course, it isn’t going to happen. The only baseball players doing any showing up anytime…
Michael Irvin sat in the middle of the Dallas Cowboys’ locker room signing footballs and glossies hours after practice. They were for unknown people on the outside somewhere. He was the last Cowboy around. A shoe guy was holding out the ’95 Nike with two hands for Irvin’s perusal, like…
Bill Bates wanted to be a Dallas Cowboy ever since elementary school. He had spent his life preparing for this career on the field. But nothing prepared him for the night last week at Incredible Universe when a pair of soft cotton panties came sliding across the table for an…
Before you can say “all-you-can-eat platter,” we will have the biggest stock-car racing complex–as much as 1,000 acres and up to 250,000 seats–sitting in that undeveloped Tarrant County sprawl near Alliance Airport. At least, that’s where the track should be if North Carolina racing titan Bruton Smith does what makes…
Editor’s note: Jennifer Briggs, who has covered sports for more than a decade, this week joins the Observer as sports columnist. The microphones and notepads hang like Spanish moss around the tall man in the locker room, still wet from the showers and pumped from his first game back in…
